The United States of Japan
Japan didn't set out to be a pop-culture superpower. It just played out that way.
This week, I’m experimenting with recording an audio version of my essay. Love it? Hate it? Let me know what you think!
Two news stories from Monday’s headlines, seemingly unrelated: Noah Lyles' Yu-Gi-Oh! cards: Love for anime inspired 100m winner (USA Today) and ‘Too many old people’: A rural Pa. town reckons with population loss (The Washington Post). So what does a story about a rapidly ageing American town have to do with a young athlete who carries Japanese trading cards on him at time trials?
Quite a lot, actually. I borrowed the title of this essay from one I wrote for The New Yorker back in 2018. America’s love, even need, for Japanese fantasies has only grown in the years since. In these two newspaper stories, you can see how America has come to share Japan’s tastes. You can also see why.
Japan has honed the art of creating illustrated entertainment into a science, charming young people all over the world with its manga and anime. But these products don’t succeed on their quality alone. They succeed because the societies of advanced nations around the world, and America’s in particular, increasingly resemble Japan. Over the course of the late 20th and early 21st century Japan, emerged as a pop-cultural empire, not out of any overarching plan or grand design. In fact, one could argue that Japan’s pop culture conquered the world in spite of the efforts, or lack thereof, of its creators. Even today, Japan mainly makes stuff for itself. The world eats it up because it fills needs we didn’t think to ask quite yet – or couldn’t.
The anime-loving Olympian Noah Lyles is a 26 year old sprinter who took home a bronze medal in the much-delayed Tokyo Olympics. Now he’s getting another shot at the gold: yesterday, he won the 100 meter dash at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials, qualifying him to run in the Paris Games next month. Key to Lyles’ success is his tremendous talent, of course. But he had another card up his sleeve, or rather several in his track suit: an “Exodia the Forbidden One” and a coveted, costly “Blue-Eyes White Dragon,” both trading cards from a Japanese manga-anime-game franchise calledYu-Gi-Oh! He’s also known for taking the Dragon Ball hero Goku’s “Kamehameha” pose after winning matches. (There is probably no better image of global cultural transformations than a hugely successful Black American draped in the stars and stripes, posing like a Japanese manga character, who is based on a Chinese hero. But I digress.)
Yu-Gi-Oh! and its associated trading card game “Duel Monsters” were part of a holy trinity of game-centric fare that hit big in the early Aughts, when Lyles was just a boy. The other two are Pokémon and Digimon.Yu Gi Oh! debuted as a manga; the seminal Pokémon Red and Blue were developed as Nintendo GameBoy cartridges; and the first Digimon was a gadget, a sequel to the Tamagotchi series of virtual pets. It’s a testament to how robust the Japanese content-creation space is that each one of these megahits emerged from totally different media ecosystems.
Yu-Gi-Oh! was the brainchild of a manga artist named Kazuki Takahashi. It debuted in 1996 in the pages of Shonen Jump, Japan’s top manga weekly (and, arguably, Japan’s top manga anything.) Yu-Gi-Oh! means something like “king of games,” and the story is classic wish fulfilment. It centers on an average young man who gets possessed by a spirit that, when awakened, makes him a master puzzle-solver and gamer. Initially the series focused on schoolyard drama, as do so many other Jump comics. But a story arc involving a trading card game that Takahashi dreamed up captivated readers, turning what had been a decently performing series into Jump’s hottest title.
Jump’s parent company and publisher, Shueisha, licensed the rights to develop Takahashi’s fictional game to a real-world maker of games, Konami. Over the next two decades, Konami sold 35 billion “Duel Monsters” cards worldwide. Some of which ended up in the hands of a American boy who would grow up to become an Olympian.
Why would Lyles, a kid from Gainesville, Florida, be so inspired by something that had been made by and for kids in Japan? There’s a complex reason, and a simple reason. The simple one is this: when it came to kid’s fare, and tween-early teen fare in particular, American franchises couldn’t hold a candle to Japanese ones.
It’s a lot harder for American companies to develop cross-platform kid-friendly franchises of the sort Japan does. Anime is traditionally developed in “production committees” of publishers, TV stations, toy companies, etc., that eliminate the barriers to multi-platform marketing (you liked the manga... now watch the show / buy the toy / listen to the record / read the novelization, etc., etc.) And the US has far stricter rules about advertising in children’s shows. You can’t show (for instance) Pokémon cards in the Pokémon TV series, or even run ads for Pokémon merchandise in the same timeframe. Japan has no such restrictions, making for a brutally competitive marketplace. So when the “fittest” of its entertainment products drop on the American marketplace, there is often nothing even remotely comparable, let alone competitive.
Quality is the simple reason. But there are more complex factors at work. These hits were also products of a sea change in childhood, in both Japan and the US: a great migration of kids indoors. I spent huge swaths of my childhood in the Eighties roaming far from home without any means of staying in contact with my parents. Games back then were far too simple to hold our attention for long, and the rare cartoon cross-overs and spin-offs were really dopey stuff. (I still remember playing that Pac-Man board game at the house of a friend whose parents wouldn’t buy him an Atari 2600. Grim stuff.) So we inevitably found ourselves outdoors.
Japanese kids once played outdoors in great numbers, too, but suburban sprawl over the course of the Eighties and Nineties decimated the open spaces in which they once played. The creator of Pokémon, Satoshi Tajiri, has spoken at length about how the loss of outdoor play opportunities drove a nature-loving boy like him indoors, to arcades and game consoles. In many ways, Pokémon’s forests and grasslands and seas represent a digitization of his pre-game childhood memories, bringing an idealized outdoors to the indoors.
Yu-Gi-Oh! , Pokémon, and Digimon hit the US marketplace at the turn of the Millennium, a time when “helicopter parenting,” in which parents kept much tighter watch over their children, was making headlines. In the States, it wasn’t that kids lost outdoor spaces so much as the freedom to play in them: fearful of risk, parents shuttled them among structured, supervised activities. Kids still want to have adventures, of course – which is where all those comics, cartoons, video games, and card games came into (literal) play. And Japan consistently made the best of them.
And that brings us to the other story, from rural Sheffield, Pennsylvania. It’s a sobering article, about the hollowing out of an all-American small town due to its rapidly ageing population. Japan isn’t mentioned once, but the story reads like many written about Japan, from decades ago to just a few months back. Last week, I wrote about the “hyperageing” of Japan – now we have an example of the same thing from the American heartland.
The Post offers a glum appraisal of Sheffield’s prospects. But the same demographic trends bedeviling that small town are playing out across the US, and across advanced societies around the world. The reasons for this are many and varied. But hurdles to young people launching stable careers, the accompanying sense of financial precarity, and growing ambivalence about the future number among them. These concerns aren’t necessarily unique to the moment, but they amplified in the States over the course of the 2010s, accelerating all the more during the pandemic 2020s. But Japan has been grappling with them for a much longer time, since its own “lost decades” began in 1990.
So in other words, by reaching the future a little ahead of the West, Japan, and its content creators, began creating things that met the needs of its children and adults – increasingly indoors, isolated, and in need of stimulation and comfort and escape – just as the children and adults of other nations were approaching these same sorts of societal milestones. This wasn’t canny – it was lucky. Effectively Japan is surfing waves of societal trends that radiate outward from itself to post-industrial nations around the world.
Which isn’t to denigrate the hard work Japanese creators put into their products. Having spent twenty-plus years in the Japanese content creation industry, I know this from firsthand experience. But if this were the 80s, or even the 90s, American pundits would be gnashing their teeth over some perceived invasion of young hearts and minds by foreign masterminds. I saw it happen in real time, when Newsweek and Time and all the rest ran scare stories about the Pokémon fad. Interestingly, we don’t see much of that today. Part of this is because (as I wrote a few weeks back) Japan and the things it makes are no longer seen as controversial topics. But a bigger part is because successive generations of American tastemakers have grown up on Japanese fantasies themselves – which, bringing things full circle, is how an all-American sports celebrity like Noah Lyles can make Japanese tastes a big part of his public persona, and nobody bats an eye.
As an older millennial it has been interesting watching the transformation of Japanese culture and media in America.
I remember having to download Cowboy Bebop over dial-up hiding that I had the internet connected all night from my parents. Even younger than that, playing Nintendo and Super Nintendo and having no concept that these were Japanese devices.
Of course these have led me to my current day, which is a strong fascination of just about everything Japan, from the language to the culture and its history.
It's so much different today where my kid can watch almost any anime she wants, streaming directly to the TV. Her friends know Dragon Ball, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh, My Hero Academia and it is not a nerdy or niche thing. It is simply common knowledge.
Grammar error:
"Japan isn’t mentioned once, but the story reads many from about Japan"
(I think?)